I work at a university and we've tried to set up the same things on our wifi network. The problem is that in order to use our wifi, you have to log in via a web browser first. Additionally, whenever the device sleeps, it releases the dhcp ip, so when it awakes, you have to redo this process unless you can get on a whitelist. Our departmental devices can, but I doubt they'd allow a student this convenience. You may wish to wait until you get to college and see how the network functions before buying something.

is probably a way to avoid liability if it ends up causing an accident. "Your honor, it wasn't our technology, it was the linux geeks who wrote the software that caused the crash."

I could throttle my outbound traffic, but I only want to throttle the outbound traffic of the video, not everything else. But its possible. Another thing is that the ip's that I saw flashing by on Little Snitch's activity monitor weren't local. I was getting connections from other .edu domains but 10 states away. Lots of people here were watching the inauguration, but I didn't see one connection to anyone here. All the connections were outside our lan.

I have Little Snitch on my mac and noticed all the OUTGOING bandwidth being used while watching their video stream. After I figured out what was going on, I went to MSNBC instead. The quality is great at CNN and the idea is decent, but unless I read the EULA (which I didn't beforehand), I wouldn't know my contribution to the cloud. My employer monitors outgoing bandwidth usage and I could have been in trouble for high flows if I would have watched the whole thing. Being at a university, we have a large pipe, but I think I needed to be asked first a little more explicitly if they could use it.

I think that the real meat of the issue got overshadowed by your commentary on your personal experience. What happens to our virtual identities? What happens when you can't have the name you've built? The same thing happens on AIM and other sites. When you are forced by circumstances to develop a new name, something changes. I'm hoping the discussion here will start to address issues like prospects for a global name registry or a solution to this issue.